Critical Thinking - Chapter 1

  • Prominent Features
  • Is reflective
  • Involves standards (accuracy, relevance, depth etc)
  • Is authentic
  • Involves being reasonable
  • Three components
  1. Asking questions
  • The most difficult part of critical thinking: noticing that there are questions to ask
  • Engaging with the questions we ask (the difference between an empty and a meaningful question lies in the spirit in which we ask it)
  • A good question is one we really want an answer to
  1. Reasoning them out
  • Not an answer we have always taken for granted and not thought about
  • Not an impressionistic answer
  • Not before gathering information
  • Not according to how we were raised (without examining it)
  • Not in accordance with our personality (without examining its influence on our reasoning)
  • Not using reasoning to defend the first thing that comes to mind
  • Rethinking the question, reformulating it in a more neutral way
  • Noticing the resistance to doing it
  • Two major obstacles

-Human spontaneous reaction

-Learned social responses

-Misunderstanding what reasoning means (not just any discussion or debate; different spirit)

-Not reasoning out WELL

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  1. Believing the results of our reasoning (internalizing them, acting) - the litmus test of critical thinking

-Resistance to internalizing them (What concepts am I bringing to bear?)

-Denial

-Four indicators:

  • I feel strong emotions as I reason something out
  • I end up believing contradictory things
  • I believe very strongly and I don’t need reasons for the belief, it’s obvious
  • My actions don’t follow my reasoning
  • What Critical Thinking is NOT
  1. Not negative (critical – criteria)
  2. Not judgmental (although judgments are essential to critical thinking, and unavoidable)
  3. We can distance ourselves from negativity (getting away from childhood responses to negative feedback)
  4. Not emotionless (while some emotions get in the way, others enhance critical thinking, give us different kinds of data)
  5. Not disconnected from feelings
  6. Desires are the engine of critical thinking
  7. Not ONLY problem solving (it poses the very problem we want to solve)
  • Impediments
  • The news, movies, TV, advertising, magazines as our source of information about the world (distortion)
  • Stereotyping, all or nothing, us versus them etc (reductive)
  • Fears
  • Some educational practices
  • Deeper, more pervasive impediments
  • Egocentrism

-Difficult to see it in ourselves

-Impediment to empathy

-Impediment to fair mindedness

-Impediment to looking at ourselves (and all that we identify as ‘us’) critically (with criteria)

-Impediment to seeing the big picture clearly (grades!)

  • Developmental Patterns of Thinking
  • Previous commitments, personal experience

-The importance of preponderance of evidence

-Personal experience: impediment, enhancer

-Limits of personal experience

-The importance of the data underlying any conclusion

  • How deep is our need for critical thinking?
  • Decision making
  • Meaningfulness
  • Concepts
  • Our thinking, desires, emotions are based on concepts
  • Concepts are culturally, socially, historically determined
  • Reexamining concepts critically allows us to have healthier responses (opposite to denial)
  • The experience of learning to think things through
  • We will NOTfeel we are progressing

-We will slow down our thinking

-We will see questions we don’t have answers to

-We start second guessing ourselves

-Our bluff is called (I know exactly why, how …)

-We feel discouraged

-We are not able to apply critical thinking in practice

-We don’t know whether we are applying it correctly

-We feel confused when concepts overlap

-We feel we will never get there

-We go back and forth between certainty and doubt

-We feel we know less than before

-We feel the teacher is not doing a good job: she does not answer questions, make things obvious, pacify our anxiety

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